Fielding a Field Notes Comeback

Library projects are digitizing researchers’ resources

Page 117 of Donald Erdman's journal includes a drawing of a red and black Labrid [sic] and Epinephelus. The page is from a field book documenting Erdman's specimen collecting in the Persian Gulf and Red Sea under the auspices of the Arabian American Oil Company in 1948.

Large-scale digitization is reshaping the library’s contribution to research, and the natural sciences are front and center.

Until recently, researcher field notes and firsthand observations were difficult to digitize because of handwriting issues and formatting. Three projects—the Field Book Project, the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) Field Notes Project, and Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature—are changing that.

Field notes are an invaluable resource for students and researchers alike. Edward Davis, assistant professor in the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Oregon, says, “We must ensure that future workers won’t have to search for our field books; without supporting documentation, the specimens we collect today may as well be paperweights.” Digital library consortia, specifically BHL, already provide millions of digitized items for public access and sharing across several contributing institutions. Now those collections can include field notes, too.

This undated letter from William Brewster (1851–1919)—a renowned American amateur ornithologist, first president of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, and a president of the American Ornithologists’ Union—to the editor of The American Naturalist records his observations of a spotted sandpiper diving into a pond to escape a hawk.

Page 117 of Donald Erdman’s journal includes a drawing of a red and black Labrid [sic] and Epinephelus. The page is from a field book documenting Erdman’s specimen collecting in the Persian Gulf and Red Sea under the auspices of the Arabian American Oil Company in 1948.

Page 39 documenting Martin H. Moynihan’s study of birds on May 6, 1960. The page is from field notes on Saltator (birds), Frijoles and Barro Colorado Island, Panama, 1962. Moynihan (1928–1996) was a world authority on animal behavior, with major contributions to the study of communication in birds, primates, and cephalopods.

In 1905, the California Academy of Sciences sent 11 men off for a year and a day on an 85-foot schooner destined for the Galapagos Islands. Twenty-six-year-old Washington Henry Ochsner travelled as the expedition’s geologist, and his field book from the expedition, contributed to BHL by the California Academy of Sciences, represent a close and careful record of his scientific observations, including geological survey information and inferences about how geological features were formed.

Handwritten diary from William Whitman Bailey, covering April 1867 to April 1868, when Bailey was botanist to the United States Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel. Illustrated with drawings and mounted photos.

George Engelmann was a German-American botanist who was instrumental in describing the flora of western North America. This drawing is from a collection of notes on 23 botanical families. The folders contain original handwritten notes and botanical sketches (some in color), some written and drawn by Engelmann, some sent to him. This drawing includes species of Violaceae.

The Field Book Project began in 2010 as a joint initiative between the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History (NMNH), Smithsonian Libraries, and the Smithsonian Institution Archives. Currently led by Smithsonian Libraries Associate Director Martin Kalfatovic and Smithsonian Institution Archives Director Anne Van Camp, the project has already cataloged more than 7,500 field books across eight departments within the Smithsonian and plans to add another 2,600 within the next two years. The BHL Field Notes Project, run by Smithsonian Libraries and the Smithsonian Institution Archives, is a collaborative project among nine US partners to make field notes available on library consortia such as BHL, the Internet Archive, and the Digital Public Library of America. Some of those partners include the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History and Harvard University Herbaria.

The Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature project, which began October 1, 2015, aims to include 100 new content providers and 50 in-copyright titles. The project will assist these content providers with digitization, metadata creation, and curation by September 30, 2017. Many of the involved content providers are small institutions that would normally not be able to contribute to a digital library consortium such as BHL because of lack of funding or training.

The goal of all three projects is to provide users with easy access to primary source documentation in the natural sciences.

PATRICK BURKE is editorial assistant for American Libraries.

Share

Tagged Under

Related Articles

Intended to offer suggestions for anyone, regardless of musical training or experience, who is seeking to develop music collections in libraries of all kinds, A Basic Music Library: Essential Scores and Sound Recordings, Fourth Edition, Volume 2: World Music, published by ALA Editions, remains a benchmark of its kind. Prepared by Music Library Association, volume 2 concentrates on folk and traditional music of North America; traditional and popular music of the Americas and the Caribbean; music of Asia and Oceania; music of Northern Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia; music of sub-Saharan Africa; music of Europe; and international anthologies.

About 20 students at the University of Oregon in Eugene silently protested murals at Knight Library on February 14. Individuals from the group said that the murals were racist, citing lines from one mural, The Mission of a University, which read: “It means conservation and betterment not merely of our national resources but also of our racial heritage and opportunity to the lowliest.” Protesters held signs reading “Take it down or we will” and “Hate is not heritage.”

John Eggerton writes: “Anchor institutions say they have a plan for closing the digital rural divide, and expanding access to TV white spaces is a big part of it. In announcing a ‘To and Through Anchors’ branded strategy, the Schools, Health, and Libraries Broadband Coalition says that it would cost between $13 and $19 billion to connect every anchor institutions—schools, libraries, community centers—in the country (excluding Alaska) with fiber, which in turn could help connect the vast majority of unserved and underserved rural communities to high-speed broadband.”

Civil rights pioneer, Georgia congressman, and award-winning author John Lewis will continue his March series of graphic novels with a new multipart book called Run. The series will tell the next chapter of civil rights history, including Lewis’s leadership of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Lewis will team up again with March coauthor Andrew Aydin, and the series will feature a new artist, Afua Richardson, as well as contributions from original artist Nate Powell. The first book will be available August 18 from Abrams ComicArts.

Lynsay WIlliams writes: “For university libraries, it can sometimes be difficult to get students—especially new students—comfortable with coming into the library and engaging with library staff. We asked some academic librarians how they get creative with their student outreach to welcome students to campus and to the library.”

Sarah Laskow writes: “On any given day, from her home on the Isle of Man, Linda Watson might be reading a handwritten letter from one Confederate soldier to another, or a list of convicts transported to Australia. Or perhaps she is reading a will, a brief from a long-forgotten legal case, an original Jane Austen manuscript. Whatever is in them, these documents made their way to her because they have one thing in common: They are close to impossible to read.”

Kate MacMillan writes: “Looking at the Oxford Dictionary’s shortlist for 2017 word of the year, I was startled by the words white fragility. According to the Oxford Dictionary Blog, white fragility is ‘a mass noun that describes the discomfort and defensiveness on the part of a white person when confronted about racial inequality and injustice.’ It is a contentious word and one that some in the school library struggle with in dealing with their student populations.”